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In his new book, “If There Is No God: The Battle Over Who Defines Good and Evil,” the right-wing radio host and edutainment impresario Dennis Prager spends a couple of pages discussing the killing, in 1989, of a sixteen-year-old American girl by her parents, one of whom was Muslim and born in the West Bank. “I’m not picking on them because they’re Muslim or because they’re Palestinian,” Prager writes. “It just happens that this story was about them.” In the next paragraph, Prager seems to change his mind about why he’s picking on them: “In many parts of the Arab world, parents essentially own their children, especially daughters.”

Ostensibly, Prager is recounting this awful crime because it illustrates a central question taken up by his book, which is “Why do people hurt other people?” The answer, by and large, turns out to be secularism. “The death of God has led to massive deaths of men, women, and children,” Prager writes, citing the “secular doctrines” of Nazism and communism. Secular creep, he goes on, “also appears to be leading to the death of Western civilization.” One might wonder why Prager would choose a thirty-seven-year-old murder, which he implies is linked to monotheistic religious extremism, to build his case against secularism. But the God he has in mind is specifically that of “the Judeo-Christian outlook.” The sole “source of objective morality,” Prager suggests, is the Bible. Prager does not mention that the murdered girl’s mother, who held her down while her father stabbed her to death, was Catholic and from Brazil, a country whose most famous landmark is a hundred-and-twenty-four-foot statue called “Christ the Redeemer.”

“If There Is No God” is not the worst thing Prager has ever written. (That honor may go to a two-part op-ed from 2008, titled “When a Woman Isn’t in the Mood,” in which he explains why wives should have sex with their husbands even when they don’t feel like it.) That said, if Prager’s new book were a term paper, his teacher would have a lot to say. She might flag, for instance, that lack of symmetry between his argument and his choice of grisly anecdote. She might object to the tautological reasoning, or to the flagrant cultural animus and Islamophobia. Using terminology from the education world, she might say, politely, that Prager has many “areas of growth” as a student, or that his progress toward grade level is “emerging.”

Yet Prager, a co-founder of the conservative education-media nonprofit PragerU, is one of the most influential voices in education in the United States today. PragerU is not an accredited university, but curriculum materials from its PragerU Kids division, on American history, civics, and financial literacy, are approved for optional classroom use in eleven mostly right-leaning states. (One of those states, Oklahoma, also worked with PragerU to develop a short-lived multiple-choice test intended to screen teachers for signs of “woke indoctrination.” Last year, PragerU unveiled the Founders Museum, a “partnership” with the White House and the U.S. Department of Education featuring A.I.-generated video testimonials from luminaries of the American Revolution. These include a digitized John Adams who ventriloquizes the words of the right-wing influencer Ben Shapiro, almost verbatim: “Facts do not care about our feelings.”

PragerU is also supplying the multimedia content for the Freedom Truck Mobile Museums, a travelling exhibition of touch-screen displays, Revolutionary War artifacts, and A.I. slop that will chug across the country on tractor-trailers throughout 2026, in celebration of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It seems that the battle over who defines good and evil—or, at least, over who defines American history—will be waged, in part, from the helm of an eighteen-wheeler.

Prager, who is seventy-seven, is an observant Jew who sees evangelical Christians as natural allies in his pursuit of “transforming America into a faith-based nation,” as he once wrote. (He has also lamented what he termed Jewish “bigotry” toward evangelical Christians, whose “support, and often even love, of the Jewish people and Israel is the most unrequited love I have ever seen on a large scale.”) In 2009, decades into a successful career in conservative talk radio, he co-founded PragerU, in order to provide what he called a “free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media, and education.” PragerU has received major funding from hard-right benefactors, including Betsy DeVos’s family foundation and the billionaire fracking brothers Dan and Farris Wilks. According to its most recent tax filing—which describes PragerU’s purpose as “marketing and producing educational content for all ages, 4-104, with a focus on a pro-American, Judeo-Christian message”—it received more than sixty-six million dollars in donations in 2024. (In November of that year, Prager sustained a severe spinal-cord injury in a fall that left him paralyzed below the shoulders; he has since resumed making video content for the PragerU website, and composed part of “If There Is No God” by dictation.)

Prager’s nonprofit is just one of dozens of conservative organizations, many of them Christian, that are named as “partners” in the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, which is overseen by Linda McMahon, the Education Secretary. The coalition has the secular task of developing programming for America’s birthday, such as PragerU’s Founders Museum and the Freedom Trucks, the latter of which received a fourteen-million-dollar grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. (In March, President Trump signed executive orders to dismantle both the I.M.L.S. and the D.O.E.; they remain alive, albeit in shrunken, ideologized versions of their former selves.) Other America 250 partners include both of the major pro-Trump think tanks (the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation), a Christian liberal-arts school (Hillsdale College), the Supreme Court’s favorite conservative-Christian legal-advocacy group (the Alliance Defending Freedom), the Christian-right-aligned church of Charlie Kirk (Turning Point USA), and something called Priests for Life.

According to a D.O.E. press release, the America 250 coalition is “dedicated to renewing patriotism, strengthening civic knowledge, and advancing a shared understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the nation.” Of course, one of America’s founding principles, taught in every civics class, is the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which might seem to frown on the knitting together of so many religious organizations and public funds intended to advance civic education.

“Real patriotic education,” McMahon said, at the opening of the Founders Museum last year, “means that, just as our founders loved and honored America, so we should honor them, while deeply learning and earnestly debating, still, their ideas.” One way to take McMahon up on this challenge is to deeply learn what James Madison wrote, in 1785, after a bill arose in Virginia’s General Assembly to establish a taxpayer provision for “Teachers of the Christian Religion.” In a petition to his colleagues in the Assembly, Madison asked, “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?” He abhorred the proposal as “a melancholy mark” of “sudden degeneracy.” “Instead of holding forth an Asylum to the persecuted,” he wrote, “it is itself a signal of persecution.” A governing body that would permit such an incursion on the free exercise of religion was one that “may sweep away all our fundamental rights,” Madison warned. The bill died.

Although PragerU has won fans at the highest levels of federal and state government, its educational content and short-form videos are reviled across many chambers of the internet, where the Prager name—attached to videos with titles such as “DEI Must Die,” “Preferred Pronouns or Prison,” “Multiculturalism: A Bad Idea,” and “Is Fascism Right or Left?”—has become synonymous with MAGA-brand disinformation. (PragerU claims that its videos receive tens of millions of views per quarter, but these metrics have not been independently verified.) A PragerU Kids video called “How to Think Objectively,” which was reportedly shown in Houston public schools, provides the thinnest façade for a lesson in climate-change denial. Democratic socialism and, especially, immigration are scourges of the Prager-verse, which has attempted to undermine the constitutional provision of birthright citizenship and cranked out endless pro-ICE videos since the Department of Homeland Security began its violent occupations of Minneapolis and other major U.S. cities.

The most noxious PragerU videos often involve slavery. In the PragerU Kids series “Leo & Layla’s History Adventures,” animated versions of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington are deputized to play down the historical significance of slavery; Christopher Columbus goes a step further, using slavery to introduce children to the concept of moral relativism. (“How can you come here to the fifteenth century and judge me by your standards in the twenty-first century?” Columbus asks.) A now deleted video—as bland as a corporate-compliance webinar, and scored to a generic hip-hop beat—gives Robert E. Lee a thumbs-up for crushing the attempted rebellion of enslaved people at Harper’s Ferry. The video also uncritically shares Lee’s view that slavery was harder on whites than on Black people, since “Blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa.”

In terms of historical facts and narrative, the A.I. videos that PragerU produced for the Founders Museum offer nothing so repugnant. In fact, they offer close to nothing at all. Like a poorly trained large language model, John Adams filibusters on his bona fides, calling himself a “voice for independence” who believed in “telling the truth” and who “stood on principle.” The content is oddly content-free, and then it repeats. Thomas Jefferson, who never blinks, says, “We must guard liberty with learning.” Adams, who seems to be reading off a teleprompter, tells us, “Guard liberty well, for, once lost, it is lost forever.” Ben Franklin agrees: “Respect this founding, friend. It is your inheritance, hard-won and fragile. Guard it well.”

A commonality across all the PragerU videos, and distinctly those in the PragerU Kids catalogue, is their total aesthetic bankruptcy, their absence of beauty or joy or wit. It’s impossible to imagine anyone enjoying any of this or electing to watch it, not because it’s factually wrong or propagandistic but because it’s ugly and boring. The intentionality of the misinformation—or the absence of information—coupled with the laziness of the execution ties a perfect knot of contempt. The various characters in “How to Think Objectively” grimace and vocalize as if the woke mob had dosed them with tainted ketamine. The “Leo & Layla” render-farm animation of Martin Luther King, Jr., sways back and forth affectlessly, like a puppet on a stick, voiced by an actor doing a bad Jay-Z impression. Perhaps Dr. King is dissociating, and the viewer should follow his lead.

In the Founders Museum, PragerU’s Chuck E. Cheese-ification of Presidents is hideous enough, but the animation deteriorates further as you click through to lesser-known revolutionaries, their mouths taking on the shape and muscular coördination of a Wombo A.I. The merchant Francis Lewis blankly recounts the death of his wife after her imprisonment by the British, and concludes, “Freedom demands much of us, but what it gives in return is everything.” Another Founder, Roger Sherman, intones, “I did my part. Now you must do yours.” It’s entirely unclear what the viewer is being asked to do, which may be the point. Dennis Prager once admitted that he didn’t mind accusations that PragerU indoctrinates its young viewers, saying, “We bring doctrines to children. That’s a very fair statement.” But perhaps indoctrination and stupefaction go hand in hand. Maybe reaching patriotic Judeo-Christian nirvana should feel like the unbearable lightness of an emptied mind. ♦

Filmmakers like to call themselves storytellers for the same reason that politicians like to call themselves public servants: it’s a show of deference toward a popular ideal. Yet few of them treat stories as their fundamental unit of creation. One who does so is the Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo, whose narrative imagination is so fertile that “prolific” might as well be part of his name. He has developed a system of low-budget and D.I.Y. production that enables him to make many movies quickly. Moreover, the films that have emerged—twenty-five features since 2010—suggest that his casual observations are instantly crystallized not in the form of images or characters, moods or even ideas, but as full-blown dramas. His latest release, “What Does That Nature Say to You,” which screened in last year’s New York Film Festival and is opening February 27th, is the fictional synthesis of a car, a house, and a bottle. It’s also one of the few movies of his that, were it transcribed and handed over to a mediocre director, would still bear the same spark of life, even if it wouldn’t similarly catch emotional and aesthetic fire.

Here, the art house meets the Fockers, albeit with an air of mystery and wisdom that, from the start, sets it apart from simpler or more blatant approaches to the subject. A youngish couple is parked at a roadside in rural South Korea, near a river and facing some mountains: Kim Junhee (Kang Soyi) is returning home to visit her parents. Her boyfriend, Donghwa (Ha Seongguk), whom they have never met, has driven her there and is dropping her off. He admires the family’s house, perched high on a mountainside, initially from afar, and she invites him to come up and see it. The resulting encounters with her family—her father, Kim Oryeong (Kwon Haehyo); her mother, Choi Sunhee (Cho Yunhee); and her sister, Kim Neunghee (Park Miso)—are the catalysts of revelations that prove consequential for the couple and the family alike.

Hong’s method is akin to drypoint: a sort of Impressionism of spontaneity, intricacy, and solidity, in which the rapid gesture gains in weight as it’s extended in time. He relies on copious, blunt, expressive, and philosophically reflective dialogue that is nonetheless entirely in keeping with the personalities of the speakers and with the immediate logic of the action. Like all melodramatists, Hong deals in coincidence and magnifies casual connections and minor accidents into life-shaking events. Without restraining his characters’ relentless forward motion with exposition, he finds them burdened by their past and revealing it in brief but incendiary flashes at unguarded moments of conversation. As ever in Hong’s movies, one of the key looseners of such talk is alcohol—which, here, takes on a peculiarly gendered role, as Oryeong, quickly bonding with Donghwa by admiring the oddity and beauty of the younger man’s thirty-year-old car, breaks out a bottle of makgeolli and then another—and then, at dinner, serves him some fine whiskey.

The men’s admiration is mutual: Donghwa is struck by the beauty of the family home and is amazed when Junhee tells him that her father designed it himself. He did so, she adds, for his mother, to whom he was deeply devoted. Oryeong did even more for her, it turns out—he landscaped the mountainside for her pleasure and comfort during her final illness. Donghwa—who’s revealed to be thirty-five—rhapsodizes about Oryeong’s devotion, and filial piety over all, although (and, perhaps, because) his own family bonds are strained. Donghwa’s father is rich and famous, familiar to Junhee’s family as Attorney Ha. Junhee’s sister says she’s sure that this “huge halo effect” must make Donghwa look all the better to her parents. Yet Donghwa, a poet, has a frayed relationship with him and prefers to maintain financial independence, though it means making a meagre living as a part-time wedding videographer. He devotes most of his time to his writing, with little to show for it but some publications in small magazines. His enthusiasm for poetry is shared by Junhee’s mother, Sunhee, who also writes, in her spare time, and has also published a bit. The uneasy overlap of enthusiasms and concerns, the grinding mesh of art and money, the diverging varieties of responsibility and independence yield a volatile dramatic mix that’s put under ever-greater pressure by a literal confinement in what turns out to be an apocalyptic dinner, a grand conflagration over the course of twenty minutes that is a set piece for the ages.

There’s a facile critical tendency to liken a wide range of talky and small-scale dramas to the films of Éric Rohmer. The comparison is almost never apt, because Rohmer’s movies are a form of stifled Surrealism, with wild and dangerous desires pressing against and threatening to shatter their taut narrative surfaces. And Hong, in general, is far more like a classic melodramatist, albeit with a modernist twist, closer in his vision of hidden history and ambient authority to the work of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. But “What Does That Nature Say to You” is the rare film where the “Rohmeresque” label is actually appropriate and revealing. As the title suggests, nature—the joy and inspiration it provides, its force, and the emotional and material price of efforts to transform and master it—plays a major role in the story. The site of the family’s house, the filial aspect of its creation, Oryeong’s efforts to embellish its wild setting and to optimize the vistas that it commands, and Donghwa’s contemplative nature poetry all converge in a surprising, exalted scene—an extended discussion between the long-married parents that blends hard-won reflective wisdom and self-interested practicality in a lyrical vision of deep-rooted romance.

Conflicts between parents and children aren’t new to Hong’s work; they drive such recent films as “Hotel by the River,” “Introduction,” and “Walk Up.” But “What Does That Nature Say to You” draws the battle lines with dazzling clarity and brings new complexities to the issue. The result is a drama of love and money, of sacred and profane love, of the forces that pull couples together and drive them apart. Hong renders these universal conflicts locally specific and intimately personal. His cinematic method gives rise to his singular style; he realizes the story with a light-toned but robust set of performances, a calm but startling array of images that dissect the action even as they frame it with painterly precision, and a control of pace that encompasses both madly rushing torrents of dialogue and an exquisitely gradual increase of tension as the characters reveal themselves. It’s a tale that any cinephile could imagine Rohmer confecting, but Hong adds a crucial element utterly alien to the Rohmerverse: doubt. His vertiginous ending, suspended over a romantic abyss, redefines the very notion of an emotional breakdown. ♦

Snow be gone! It’s time for the spring air to give us energy and hope as we head out to a new slate of shows around town. As might be expected, the culture is steeped with foreboding, offering a reflection of the national mood: a second installment of the TV series “Beef,” which takes personal grievance to new heights; Kaija Saariaho’s opera “Innocence,” at the Met, about the lingering trauma of a school shooting; the Whitney Biennial, a survey of artists responding to the American experiment. But there is also much beauty and joy to behold: Dance Theatre of Harlem’s “Firebird,” set in a Caribbean rain forest; the return of Miranda Priestly, Andy Sachs, and Emily, in “The Devil Wears Prada 2”; “Cats: the Jellicle Ball” and “Schmigadoon!” strutting their jubilance on Broadway; Waxahatchee, Dry Cleaning, Bruce Springsteen, all rolling through the city. Let the renewal begin.—Shauna Lyon

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In TV as in life, there are the haves and the have-nots. The much anticipated second season of Netflix’s “Beef” (April 16), an anthology series about interpersonal feuds that spin out of control, takes place at a country club, where the general manager (Oscar Isaac) and his wife (Carey Mulligan) get caught up in a conflict with his employees (Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny). They’re matched in lavish environs by Apple TV’s “Imperfect Women” (March 18), in which a trio of friends (Kerry Washington, Elisabeth Moss, and Kate Mara) in fancy clothes and fancier houses attempt to conjure “Big Little Lies.”

It’s unclear whether tech moguls are still satirizable, but AMC’s “The Audacity” (April 12) will test the waters with a Silicon Valley drama starring Billy Magnusson and Zach Galifianakis. Further north, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell join the Taylor Sheridan-verse as New York transplants who settle in scenic Montana after a family tragedy, in “The Madison” (March 14), on Paramount+.

Pfeiffer also stars in Apple TV’s more downscale “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” (April 15), as the mother of a college student (Elle Fanning) who gets pregnant and becomes a success on OnlyFans, gleaning advice from her estranged wrestler father (Nick Offerman). Content creation is also seen as a way out on the third season of “Euphoria” (April 12), which returns to HBO after a four-year hiatus, and follows the teens-gone-wild into their twenties. Zendaya’s Rue is still grappling with the ramifications of her opioid addiction, while Sydney Sweeney’s once sweet Cassie channels her suburban frustrations into courting attention online. A word that Sweeney used to describe the season, “unhinged,” might likewise apply to Prime Video’s “Bait” (March 25), a hard-to-categorize dramedy about a struggling actor (Riz Ahmed) whose life goes haywire after it’s publicized that he’s a finalist to play the next James Bond. Ahmed, who created the show, enmeshes his character in a Pakistani British context—and a Bondian conspiracy.

Thankfully, not everything’s feast or famine. Perfectly normal people with totally real jobs populate “Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat” (March 20), the second iteration of Prime Video’s acclaimed experimental show, in which an ordinary person has no idea that what he’s experiencing is an elaborate fake scenario with professional actors. Also on the platform, in “Spider-Noir” (May 27, in optional color or black-and-white), Nicolas Cage, now in live action, reprises his “Into the Spider-Verse” character—an over-the-hill nineteen-thirties gumshoe fighting his demons.

Wedding jitters get a horror twist in Netflix’s “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” (March 26), in which Adam DiMarco and Camila Morrone play a couple at the center of a doomed wedding. But heterosexuality gets scarier yet for the characters in “The Testaments” (April 8), Hulu’s sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale.”—Inkoo Kang

Fashion is drama in some of the most prominent new releases, as in “Marc by Sofia” (March 20), a documentary by Sofia Coppola about Marc Jacobs, anchored by the creation and launch of his Spring 2024 collection. “The Devil Wears Prada 2” (May 1) boasts many of the same actors from the first installment—including Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci—along with new ones, such as Simone Ashley, in a comedy about a fashion magazine’s efforts to cope with new media. Boots Riley’s “I Love Boosters” (May 22) is a comedy, starring Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Poppy Liu, Eiza González, and LaKeith Stanfield, about a group of shoplifters who organize against an evil designer (Demi Moore).

The season spotlights artists of many sorts, including those who work in movies. The Swedish director Tarik Saleh’s drama “Eagles of the Republic” (April 17) stars Fares Fares as a movie star who is ordered to act in a bio-pic of Egypt’s real-life President, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. In the satire “Yes” (March 27), by the Israeli director Nadav Lapid, a Tel Aviv musician and composer (Ariel Bronz) is commissioned to write an anthem in praise of Israel’s destruction of Gaza. Steven Soderbergh’s “The Christophers” (April 10) stars Ian McKellen as a once acclaimed artist whose children (Jessica Gunning and James Corden) secretly hire an art restorer (Michaela Coel) to complete some of his unfinished paintings. Coel also stars in David Lowery’s “Mother Mary” (April 17) as a fashion designer who’s summoned by a fading pop star (Anne Hathaway) to create costumes for her comeback.

Romance and its calamities are perennial spectacles, including in “The Drama” (April 3), featuring Robert Pattinson and Zendaya as a couple whose engagement is menaced by a disturbing secret. Charli XCX stars in Pete Ohs’s melodrama “Erupcja” (April 17), as a British woman whose romantic getaway in Warsaw with her partner (Will Madden) is disrupted by her reunion with a friend (Lena Góra). “Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)” (April 17), the first feature by Joel Alfonso Vargas, is centered on a young Dominican American couple in the Bronx (Juan Collado and Destiny Checo) whose relationship changes as they prepare to have a child.

The fraught bonds of parents and children get a varied workout. Julia Ducournau’s “Alpha” (March 27) is a body-horror drama about a teen-age girl (Mélissa Boros) who, as a result of a tattoo, may have contracted a mysterious disease that her mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a doctor, treats. “Is God Is” (May 15), based on the play of the same name by the film’s director, Aleshea Harris, involves twin sisters, scarred in a fire, who are sent by their mother to seek revenge on their father, who started the fire. Kara Young, Mallori Johnson, and Janelle Monáe star. “Poetic License” (May 15), the first feature directed by Maude Apatow, stars her mother, Leslie Mann, as a woman who audits a poetry class at the local college and is courted by two young classmates (Cooper Hoffman and Andrew Barth Feldman).

The enduring power of history comes to the fore in Annemarie Jacir’s drama “Palestine 36” (March 20), which depicts residents of a Palestinian village who are rising up against British rule in 1936 amid the arrival of Jewish refugees from Europe; Hiam Abbass, Saleh Bakri, and Jeremy Irons star. “Two Prosecutors” (March 20), directed by Sergei Loznitsa, is set in the Soviet Union, in 1937, and dramatizes efforts to seek justice amid trumped-up charges and show trials. Andy Serkis directs an animated adaptation of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” (May 1), featuring the voices of Seth Rogen, Gaten Matarazzo, and Glenn Close, among many others.—Richard Brody

Matters of life and death weigh heavily on the theatre this spring. On Broadway, Daniel Radcliffe catalogues simple pleasures as an antidote to depression in Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s “Every Brilliant Thing” (Hudson; in previews); Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “Dog Day Afternoon,” based on a true story from 1972, and a 1975 movie, about a bank robbery that balloons into a hostage situation, stars Jon Bernthal and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, both of “The Bear” (August Wilson; begins previews March 10). The comedy powerhouse Nathan Lane waxes tragic for Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” (Winter Garden; March 6), opposite Laurie Metcalf; Adrien Brody and Tessa Thompson star in “The Fear of 13,” based on a documentary about a death-row prisoner released after twenty-two years (James Earl Jones; March 19). Off Broadway, wills and fates so contrary run for the title characters in two Shakespearean tragedies: “Titus Andronicus,” featuring the stately Patrick Page (Pershing Square Signature Center; March 17), and “Hamlet” (BAM; April 19), starring the high-octane Hiran Abeysekera.

Shuffling off this mortal coil need not occasion grief, however. The drag-ball revamping of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” sees voguing felines vie for entry to the beyond, under the supurrvision of doyen André De Shields (Broadhurst; March 18). In the spoof “Titaníque,” with Jim Parsons hopping aboard for its Broadway transfer, the dread iceberg portends nothing worse than a hundred minutes of unrelenting Céline Dion (St. James; March 26). The macabre is a matter of fun, not fright, in “The Rocky Horror Show” (Studio 54; March 26), with Luke Evans and Stephanie Hsu, and “The Lost Boys: A New Musical,” adapted from the 1987 teen-vampire movie, envisions eternal leather-clad sexiness (Palace; March 27).

Legacy is explored in Mark Rosenblatt’s “Giant” (Music Box; March 11), about the dark side of the beloved children’s writer Roald Dahl (John Lithgow), and in Jay Presson Allen’s 1989 one-man play “Tru” (House of the Redeemer; March 6), starring Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Truman Capote. David Auburn’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning “Proof” (Booth; March 31) considers the impact of a deceased genius (Don Cheadle) on one of his daughters (Ayo Edebiri).

For anyone disinclined to contemplate mortality, there’s “Schmigadoon!,” an adaptation of the Apple TV series, about a stagnating couple who are trapped in the bighearted world of golden-age musicals (Nederlander; April 4). Romantic complications also quicken revivals of Gina Gionfriddo’s “Becky Shaw” (Hayes; March 18), about a blind date that spirals spectacularly, and Noël Coward’s “Fallen Angels,” in which the friendship of two women (Rose Byrne and Kelli O’Hara) is imperilled by the return of their ex-lover (Todd Haimes; March 27).

Other works center non-romantic relationships: “Beaches” (Majestic; March 27), a musicalization of the novel turned tearjerker film, considers lifelong friendship; “Girl, Interrupted”—another book-to-movie-to-musical, with a score by Aimee Mann—examines the bonds among women in a psychiatric ward (Public; May 13). “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” (Barrymore; March 30), August Wilson’s nineteen-tens installment of his “Century Cycle,” stars Cedric the Entertainer and Taraji P. Henson as the owners of a Pittsburgh boarding house; David Lindsay-Abaire’s satire “The Balusters” presents a neighborhood rocked by a proposal to put a stop sign on a picturesque block (Samuel J. Friedman; March 31). Braving the workplace are two alarmingly relevant revivals: “The Receptionist” (Second Stage; April 15), Adam Bock’s ink-black comedy about corporate culture, from 2007, and the New Group’s retooling of Elmer Rice’s 1923 drama “The Adding Machine,” in which an employee is replaced by technology (Theatre at St. Clement’s; March 24). Gulp.—Dan Stahl

This spring is an exciting season for acolytes of contemporary art, because two of New York’s most important recurring survey shows will align, giving viewers a chance to engage with a broad swath of new work. First up, there’s the much discussed and often controversial Whitney Biennial (opening March 8), the museum’s survey of the state of contemporary American art—which, these days, the institution defines loosely. Among this year’s fifty-six artists and collectives, some are from Afghanistan, Chile, and other places that the curators identify as “marked by the reach of U.S. power.” The following month, MOMA PS1 opens “Greater New York 2026” (April 16), its quinquennial exhibition of emerging and mid-career artists working around the city. The fifty-three exhibitors include a collective of Asian and migrant massage-parlor workers (Red Canary Song) and a pair of Ecuadorian siblings who’ve been hand-painting signs for decades (the Cevallos brothers).

But the season’s most sprawling and heterogeneous exhibition might be at the New Museum, which has finally set a date for its reopening. On March 21, the institution inaugurates its newly expanded and renovated space with “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” which examines two centuries of our relationship with technology. The show casts an especially wide net: alongside recognized art-historical names (Max Ernst) and contemporary ones (Hito Steyerl), there are writers, scientists, and architects in the mix.

For those who prefer the classics, fear not. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” (March 29) offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to go in-depth with the work of the Italian Renaissance master here in the U.S. Featuring loans from institutions across Europe, the exhibition gathers some two hundred of Raphael’s paintings, drawings, and tapestries, placing greatest hits alongside studies to illuminate his creative process. It’s worth braving the crowds for this one.

Meanwhile, the Museum of Modern Art pays tribute to a modern master with “Marcel Duchamp” (April 12). The retrospective paints a fuller picture of the man who famously turned a urinal into a sculpture and coined a whole new category, the readymade. Notably, the exhibition is organized with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where two of Duchamp’s most important art works are on permanent view; if you’re a completist, start planning your trip to Philly. (The retrospective will also travel there later this year.)

MOMA’s other notable spring show is less rigorous but a sure crowd-pleaser: “Frida and Diego: The Last Dream” (March 21). Organized in conjunction with a Metropolitan Opera production about the legendary artist couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the MOMA exhibition features a mise-en-scène by the opera’s set and co-costume designer, Jon Bausor. If production stills are any indication, his backdrop will provide flair for what’s actually a small collection show.

Those intrigued by the MOMA/Met Opera crossover may be interested in the Met Museum’s annual Costume Institute exhibition. Simply titled “Costume Art” (May 10), this year’s show is organized around “thematic body types” and pairs garments with other objects from the museum’s collections in order to take a more expansive look at clothing. Most notably, it will mark the opening of a large, new, centrally located space devoted to the Costume Institute—named Condé M. Nast Galleries, after the original publisher of this magazine. Fashion fans may want to follow it up with a visit to the Brooklyn Museum, where the designer Iris van Herpen, known for 3-D-printed dresses, is getting a solo outing (May 16).—Jillian Steinhauer

Both of the new works that the Mark Morris Dance Group is bringing to the Brooklyn Academy of Music this season (March 26-29) touch upon man’s place in the universe. In “Via Dolorosa,” the religious references are overt; the pieces for solo harp (by Nico Muhly) to which it is set are inspired by meditations on the Stations of the Cross by the poet and Anglican priest Alice Goodman. The choreography is quiet, almost angelic. “Moon,” in contrast, is a lighthearted contemplation of our relationship to outer space, and the score is built from old popular songs about the lunar orb, interspersed with sounds from the Voyager Golden Record: “Friends from space, how are you all?” The desire to reach toward something beyond ourselves suffuses both pieces.

The great spiralling rotunda of the Guggenheim will be the setting for five early dances by Lucinda Childs, high priestess of minimalist dance, on March 14-15 (co-produced by “Works & Process” and the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival). The earliest, “Pastime,” from 1963, is Childs’s most coolly absurdist—a woman reclines in a stretchy bolt of cloth, as in a bathtub, or wears a fruit bowl on her head. The other dances involve patterns of walking that unspool in space and time like elegant mathematical equations.

For its centenary season, the Martha Graham Dance Company (New York City Center; April 8-12) is bringing back Graham’s 1936 piece “Chronicle,” a hymn to heroic womanhood created by Graham in response to the rise of Fascism in Europe. The following week at City Center (April 16-19), Dance Theatre of Harlem revives its “Firebird,” a landmark production from 1982, in which the pseudo-Russian fairy tale is transported to a fantastical Caribbean rain forest (as imagined by the Trinidadian-born artist Geoffrey Holder), with a powerful Black ballerina at the center, performed by Alexandra Hutchinson.

New York City Ballet is pulling out the stops for Tiler Peck’s second ballet for the company, which it unveils during its spring season (David H. Koch Theatre; April 21-May 31). No less than the violinist Hilary Hahn will perform the score, Édouard Lalo’s brilliant violin concerto “Symphonie Espagnole,” at the première, on May 7. Peck’s choreographic ambition—the piece is for thirty dancers—is not surprising given her own virtuosity and fine-tuned musicality as a dancer. The company also performs, for the first time, Christopher Wheeldon’s 2002 “Continuum,” a companion piece to his better-known “Polyphonia,” set to piano études by György Ligeti.—Marina Harss

The spring slate of concerts in contemporary music is defined by curation, highlighted by the long-running European festival C2C, which returns to New York for its second year with a caravan of beloved eccentrics: Arca, Los Thuthanaka, Nourished by Time, Aya, YHWH Nailgun, and many more (Knockdown Center; May 8).

The nonprofit cultural center Pioneer Works offers programming for nearly every niche. On March 19, the jazz saxophonist and composer Immanuel Wilkins brings his quartet for a celebration of a new album, “Live at the Village Vanguard Vol 1.” On March 24, the space brings together Maria Somerville and Joanne Robertson, impressionistic artists who broke out with mesmerizing records last year. That same week, the ever-evolving multi-disciplinarian Meshell Ndegeocello performs as part of Winter Jazzfest (March 29). On April 3, the dynamic instrumental-rock trio Dirty Three returns to the city for the first time since 2009. And on May 1, the organist and minimalist musician Kali Malone stages “Does Spring Hide Its Joy,” an immersive piece blending visuals with nonlinear composition.

Brooklyn Paramount’s lineup is equally diverse, if more centrist in its appeal. There’s the Swedish electro-pop star Zara Larsson (March 26-27) and the feverish K-pop group NMIXX (March 31); Lindsey Jordan’s lush crossover project Snail Mail (April 15); two of the preëminent forces in indie rock, the Katie Crutchfield vehicle Waxahatchee and the slacker messiah MJ Lenderman (April 19); and Dave, the decorated and ascendant king of British rap (April 30-May 1).

Elsewhere, there is no shortage of guitar-driven singer-songwriter music of all stripes. At Public Records, drift into the soft-spun acoustic folk of Annahstasia (April 1-4). Music Hall of Williamsburg gets possessed by the eerie, ethereal melodies of Skullcrusher (April 15). At Irving Plaza, join an emotional cross-examination of self with the droll, demure music of Eliza McLamb (April 24). Extending beyond that sphere, there’s multifaceted alt-rock (Hayley Williams, Hammerstein Ballroom; April 9-12), evocative drone metal (Sunn O))), Town Hall; April 12), and wry post-punk (Dry Cleaning, Brooklyn Steel; May 7), for those seeking something more propulsive.

The arenas open their doors to big personalities from across scenes and generations. First, at Madison Square Garden, on March 25-26, the charismatic Bronx rapper Cardi B commemorates a triumphant comeback, then, on April 26, the Mexican star Peso Pluma waves a flag for the continued evolution of his regional music, which blends corridos tumbados with Latin trap. At Barclays Center, Florence + the Machine gather participants to complete the spell-casting circle of their mystic and witchy art-pop (April 21-22, 24). And with stops at both venues, Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band seek to restore the soul of the heartland on their “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour (Madison Square Garden; May 11 and 16, and Barclays Center; May 14).—Sheldon Pearce

As we defrost from this Siberian winter, a lively spread of classical performances emerges. National Sawdust, ever the usher of the new, puts on the world première of “Division of Time,” a ten-part work for cello and piano by Eric Nathan, with accompanying visual delights by the Gandini Juggling ensemble (March 25). The vocal group Khorikos fills the Guggenheim’s acoustically resounding rotunda with folk songs, Renaissance motets, and selections from Thomas Adès and Arvo Pärt—a so-called Well-Being Concert (April 11).

Some events grapple with the two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday of our discordant country. Carnegie Hall’s series “United in Sound: America at 250” includes the New York première of Ayanna Woods’s “Infinite Body” (March 24), composed for the fifty-one-person choir the Crossing, which reflects on how capitalism impacts our physical state. On April 9, “United in Sound” puts on Copland’s dreamy mainstay “Appalachian Spring,” as well as Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” and a world première by Gabriel Kahane, soloed by the clarinettist Anthony McGill. At Merkin Hall, Chanticleer rings in the semiquincentennial with a new work by Trevor Weston, which spotlights the legacy of African American spirituals. They’ll also throw in Randall Thompson’s “Alleluia,” and a little “Home” from “The Wiz” (April 21).

Speaking of America, BAM presents the New York première of “The Post Office,” an opera, by Laura Kaminsky (music) and Elaine Sexton (libretto), about a one-room post office. The main character? Benjamin Franklin (May 16-21). For something a bit more poignant, the Metropolitan Opera offers “Innocence,” the unsettling final opera by the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (April 6-29), which follows the aftermath of a school shooting, with a libretto by Sofi Oksanen and Aleksi Barrière. Heartbeat Opera, an indie operation that still packs a punch, premières its reimagining of Samuel Barber’s messy “Vanessa,” about the relationship between idealism and compromise (May 12-31). The music director, Jacob Ashworth, strips it down to five performers, plus a few chairs and some fog.

And then we have Gustavo Dudamel, in his last stretch as the New York Philharmonic’s music director designate before he can finally drop that pesky “designate” next season. This spring, he conducts Beethoven’s “Eroica” (March 12-17) and the world première of David Lang’s “the wealth of nations” (March 19-22). Also on the agenda are the eternal “Firebird” (April 30-May 2), Gershwin’s “Cuban Overture,” and Gabriela Ortiz’s “Antrópolis,” a celebration of club culture in Mexico City (May 6-8). The first section of “Antrópolis” is called “Los Infiernos”—let’s heat things up, shall we?—Jane Bua

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Remember greenery?
• Sentimental sandwiches
• “Terms and Conditions,” by Daniel Lefferts

Frederick Wiseman, the greatest of nonfiction filmmakers, died last month, at the age of ninety-six. So there’s a special poignancy—even a measure of consolation—in the arrival of a new work, from another source entirely, that exemplifies the intelligence and the rigor of Wiseman’s methods. “Pompei: Below the Clouds” is the eighth feature from the Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi, and it’s hardly the first of his films to generate such comparisons. Like Wiseman, Rosi has long eschewed voice-over narration, expository montages, direct-to-camera interviews, and other conventional formal strategies. This approach is frequently mistaken for a pose of journalistic neutrality or, worse, godlike omniscience, but it produces something livelier and far more human—an impassioned hyper-attentiveness. Also like Wiseman, Rosi serves as his own director of photography, and he explores an overarching subject—often a place or a series of places—with a roving curiosity whose energies are at once concentrated by the unwavering calm of the camera and dispersed by the briskness of the editing. (Unlike Wiseman, though, Rosi does not exclusively edit his own footage.)

In “Pompei: Below the Clouds,” which Rosi shot in black-and-white, with extraordinarily beautiful results, the camera moves on occasion, though only when it’s stationed on a vessel that is itself in motion—in this case, the Circumvesuviana, a network of trains running out of Naples and around Mt. Vesuvius. Narratively, too, Rosi rides the rails; he and the film’s editor, Fabrizio Federico, whisk us from one strand to the next, trusting us to discern the subtle, almost musical rhythm that emerges. Here is a room filled with statues and artifacts, rescued from the ruins of Pompeii. And here is a staggering glimpse of an excavation site, revealing a hollowed-out city beneath a city, where a team of Japanese archeologists devote themselves to the slow process of recovery. Down into the earth we go, into one of numerous secret tunnels carved out by tomb raiders greedy for subterranean plunder. But then up we rise again, to a majestic overhead view of Naples, with the gulf to the south and, in the distance, the looming dual peaks of Vesuvius. The mountain is a continual reminder of the famous eruption of 79 A.D.—which buried Pompeii and other settlements in ash—and also an implicit threat of disasters to come. (The title pointedly uses the spelling “Pompei,” referring not to the ancient city but to a modern one in the Naples metropolitan area.)

Rosi is fascinated—though not, it seems, overly perturbed—by the anxious bustle of life in a tectonic war zone. He regularly drops in on an emergency-call center, where workers patiently respond to all manner of residents’ queries, some as trivial as a child’s prank call, others as harrowing as a cry for help from a woman suffering domestic abuse. Most typically, though, we hear panicked concerns about earthquakes, which occur with alarming frequency. (Or perhaps not so alarming: in surely the film’s most unrepentantly Italian moment, a woman laments that a tremor struck while she was cooking a ragù.) On such inherently unstable ground, the composure of each individual shot feels all the more deliberate. This has often been Rosi’s way; he offers a contemplative ballast, a decisive counterweight to conditions of agitation and flux. In “Sacro GRA” (2013), he held steady on different locations along a heavily trafficked highway that encircles Rome. He set his camera more freely adrift in the Oscar-nominated “Fire at Sea” (2016), though every movement carried immense gravity and purpose. The film’s focus was Lampedusa, a small island that has become a major port of call for migrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and you could sense Rosi’s determination to capture an overwhelming crisis without himself becoming unmoored.

In “Pompei: Below the Clouds,” Rosi is as quietly watchful as ever, though he is either remarkably skilled or remarkably fortunate in finding individuals whose voices of conscience, matched by action, can stand in for his own. Hence a prosecutor who, wandering into an empty underground room, rails against thieves who, in removing frescoes from its walls, “obliterated our memory forever.” And what of the gently curmudgeonly man of letters who runs an after-school study room for children, tutoring them in everything from multiplication tables to Victor Hugo? I took his diligence, and Rosi’s determination to include his labors, as an act of faith; even a place awash in antiquity needs a committed investment in the future. The most instructive perspective comes from the port of Torre Annunziata, where two Syrian workers are stationed on an enormous tank loaded with Ukrainian grain. Naples, though known for its geological instability and its organized crime, fazes them not one bit. “It’s a safe city,” one says in a phone call home. “There’s no danger here.”

The film opens with a Jean Cocteau quote: “Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world.” And the screen is often duly obscured in a whitish haze, some of it moving through the skies above, some of it rising from the Phlegraean Fields, an active eight-mile-wide caldera to the west of Naples. There’s poetry in all this mistiness, and in Rosi’s monochrome palette, which is by turns crisp and ghostly, and effortless in its ability to collapse the distance between past and present. To watch the tank workers as they wade through enormous, ever-shifting hillocks of grain is to be reminded of the men, women, and children who perished here centuries ago, under a horrific onslaught of ash. We see plaster casts of the ancient dead: one is on display in a gallery, and two more are glimpsed in a scene from Roberto Rossellini’s “Journey to Italy” (1954), one of a couple of Naples-set pictures that Rosi excerpts throughout. These films-within-a-film are projected in an abandoned, crumbling cinema, an image that I find impossible to read as anything other than a lament for the medium’s own encroaching fossilization. Best to see “Pompei: Below the Clouds” on the biggest screen you can, while you can, before the theatres of today become the ruins of tomorrow.

Werner Herzog, cinema’s most prolific and undaunted explorer of the natural world, had his way with volcanoes years ago—first in the short film “La Soufrière” (1977) and then, at greater length, in “Into the Inferno” (2016). Ashes to ashes, tusks to tusks: in “Ghost Elephants,” which is being distributed by National Geographic Documentary Films (and begins streaming March 8th on Disney+ and Hulu), Herzog is off on a new, and characteristically deranged, adventure, in pursuit of enormous yet elusive pachyderms. The journey begins at the Smithsonian, which holds the remains of the largest elephant on record. He weighs eleven tons, stands more than thirteen feet high, and was felled in Angola in 1955, by the Hungarian hunter Josef J. Fénykövi. Around the museum, the elephant is known, affectionately, as Henry. We first encounter him, in the taxidermied flesh, alongside Steve Boyes, a South African conservationist who, beholding this legendary creature for the first time, can scarcely contain his awe—or his crazy ambition. Boyes believes that Henry has living descendants roaming the Angolan highlands and is determined to confirm a genetic link.

The culmination of that quest lies, as it should, at the movie’s end. But the heart of the film is a lengthy stretch in Namibia, where, from within a community of San hunter-gatherers, Boyes enlists three trackers to accompany him on the long, difficult trek to Angola. It will come as no surprise to the filmmaker’s admirers that Herzog relishes every step of the journey. Every digression here feels like a destination. We look on as a skilled hunter and master tracker named Xui digs up lethal beetle grubs, which will be mashed into a highly potent poison and smeared on the ends of his arrows. We hear Kerllen Costa, an environmental anthropologist, describe the horrors of the Angolan Civil War, including his memories of elephants, hippos, and other innocent wildlife getting caught in the crossfire. War, he reminds us, is waged not just by man against man but by man against nature.

Herzog, for his part, remains firmly interested in both nature and man. His camera is enthralled by the animals that occasionally steal into the frame: a venomous spider, covered by its equally dangerous young, gets a frightening cameo. But what absorbs him most is the intense kinship that the San feel with the elephants, to the point where, at a bonfire dance, a kind of cross-species migration of souls seems to take place. “I asked him if the spirit of an elephant had entered him,” Herzog says of one tracker, who responds in the affirmative. Boyes, too, exalts the elephants like a man possessed. When he speaks of them, you can see in his eyes the gleam of an obsession—not as wild or insatiable as the one that gripped and ultimately doomed Timothy Treadwell, the bear enthusiast at the heart of Herzog’s masterly “Grizzly Man” (2005), but one that marks Boyes, nonetheless, as the truest of believers. He suspects, much as the San do, that the fates of all creatures great and small are bound on an intricate continuum. If or when the elephants die, our own benighted species will surely not be far behind. ♦

A few days after Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” came out, a friend sent me an Onion headline about a bookseller frantically pulling classics off the shelf before Fennell enters the store. No beloved novel could be safe from the dangers of the director introducing anachronistic costumes, original songs by Charli XCX, selectively color-blind casting, and explicit B.D.S.M. scenes for its Byronic hero.

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In the case of “Wuthering Heights,” though, there was no further need to worry. The books had already flown off the shelves. In mid-February, Publishers Weekly reported that a hundred thousand copies of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel had sold in the first two months of this year, compared with a hundred and eighty thousand total last year, attributing the increase to book clubs and influencers of all stripes embracing it. People I spoke to who’d never read it before confessed their omission as a sin tantamount to not yet having watched “Heated Rivalry.” My own confession was that I’d never much liked “Wuthering Heights.” The nihilistic attachment between its doomed lovers, Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, was too stormy and unruly for my tastes. But in rereading it for my own Substack book club, in advance of the release of Fennell’s film, I came to respect both its discipline and its perversity, though not in the way Fennell’s movie might make you think.

In a certain light, “Wuthering Heights” is a respectable, conservative tale. (Hear me out.) At the beginning of the novel, we meet the cantankerous middle-aged Heathcliff and his two wards, Hareton Earnshaw and Catherine Heathcliff. The relationships eventually become clear: Hareton is the son of Hindley Earnshaw, Heathcliff’s chief childhood tormentor (and the original Cathy Earnshaw’s brother); Catherine is Cathy’s daughter and the young widow of Heathcliff’s son. The novel closes with the news that Hareton and Catherine will marry, united by a bond of true affection. Thus, the Earnshaw line survives and thrives, and the social order remains much the same at the end as it ever was.

But, to get there, Brontë enlists some of the ubiquitous tropes of her time—the foundling hero, for example—only to ruthlessly unravel them. The orphan is a Chekhov’s gun of Victorian fiction: if there’s an unattached child, expect an eventual reunion with a long-lost relative, or a sudden serendipitous inheritance that enfolds the orphan into a family line. Both of those things happen in “Jane Eyre,” also published in 1847, by Emily’s sister Charlotte Brontë. Jane stumbles upon three kind people who turn out to be her cousins, and into a fortuitous bequest of twenty thousand pounds from their shared late uncle. Emily Brontë resists such a dénouement for Heathcliff. He is introduced when Mr. Earnshaw, Cathy’s father, deposits him unceremoniously in front of his wife and his two children at Wuthering Heights, having picked the boy up off the streets of Liverpool and bundled him into his coat: “a gift of God; though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil.” (“It,” to be clear, refers to Heathcliff.) His origins are unknown, and they stay that way. There’s no explanation for his heritage, no clarity as to the nature of his darkness. As a young adult, he disappears after Cathy declares her intention to marry Edgar Linton, the son of their wealthy neighbors at Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff comes back three years later a gentleman, in affect and appearance if not at heart. But that time away and the source of his changed fortune also remain a mystery.

There’s no ending for Heathcliff that reconciles him to the cruelty shown to him by Hindley Earnshaw, who hates him from the moment that his father brings him home. (Some fault lies with Mr. Earnshaw, who had favored Heathcliff when the children were growing up but failed to legitimatize him within the family.) There’s no one left in the novel’s closing chapters to apologize to Heathcliff for the abuse that he suffered—Mr. Earnshaw, Hindley, Cathy, and Edgar are all dead—nor does he apologize to those he brutalizes in turn: his wife Isabella, whom he marries to spite her brother, Edgar, and their poor, fretful son, Linton, whom he simply abhors on principle. There’s no language for him to fully acknowledge or profit from the genuine love that his ward, Hindley’s son, Hareton, feels for him. The happiest state Heathcliff can achieve is being haunted by the ghost of Cathy, and when, at the end of the novel, he recognizes her trademark Earnshaw eyes in the two young people of his household (not surprisingly, given that they are her daughter and her nephew), the best he can do is send them out of the room, as they cause him “pain, amounting to agony.”

If Victorian fiction ordinarily treats the orphan as an engine of social mobility, whose path involves finding his place in the world, “Wuthering Heights” asserts that any such progress is temporary. At the end, Heathcliff stands alone and “unredeemed,” as Charlotte Brontë wrote of him in 1850. He destroys all his relationships, such that he can’t think of how to write his will and bequeath all the property he’s spent his life vengefully acquiring. Emily Brontë, instead, writes him out of it altogether. He has nothing to show for all of his actions. His sole biological heir predeceases him, and, once he has gone, the two homes in question, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, will pass to Hareton and young Catherine, who continue the Earnshaw family lineage. By the standards of the Victorian novel, Heathcliff, who leaves neither descendants nor legacy behind him, is a dead end.

In this way, Brontë demonstrates that not all trauma has a resolution, that belonging is a gift that not even the most powerful of novelists can readily bestow. She does not tame, contain, or tidy Heathcliff’s wild energy. It shapes his outlook even in death. When Nelly, the Earnshaw family’s longtime servant, finds his body, his eyes are wide open, with a stare both “keen and fierce.” She says, “I tried to close his eyes: to extinguish, if possible, that frightful, life-like gaze of exultation, before any one else beheld it. They would not shut.” His tombstone reminds us one last time of how little we know him. “As he had no surname, and we could not tell his age,” Nelly says, “we were obliged to content ourselves with the single word, ‘Heathcliff.’ ”

Whenever a fuss arises over the adaptation of a literary text to screen, I think of what James M. Cain told an interviewer for The Paris Review who asked him what he thought of the film that Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler made of his novel “Double Indemnity.” Their version made significant changes to the plot. Cain replied that he didn’t like movies. “I don’t go,” he said. “People tell me, don’t you care what they’ve done to your book? I tell them, they haven’t done anything to my book. It’s right there on the shelf.”

“Double Indemnity” ’s plot was reworked, in part, to sanitize the story for screen audiences. The Hays Code, a precursor to the motion-picture rating system that gave Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” an R for its depictions of violence, sex, and death, required that Hollywood movies eschew profanity, obscenity, and other indicators of low morals, and also stipulated that “the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin.” Among other potential issues, in Cain’s ending, the lovers who commit the insurance fraud at the center of the story escape the country, with plans for a double suicide. The film closes, instead, with a confession scene.

Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw in “Wuthering Heights.”Photograph courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

It’s hard these days to imagine a situation in which, through a self-imposed agreement among all the major studios, movies and television series would need to be tamer than their source material specifically so as not to corrupt the audience. If anything, in our visual culture, we tend to expect—indeed, anticipate—the opposite. But the impulse behind the Hays Code aligns with a truism of nineteenth-century fiction that its successful writers well knew: that characters who transgress within the pages of a novel could not be allowed to prosper without punishment. It doesn’t take a literary scholar to notice, for example, that adulterous women in nineteenth-century novels—English, French, Russian—meet tragic ends, no matter how sympathetically or charismatically their creators portray them. Even the men must square their accounts. In “Jane Eyre,” Mr. Rochester, Jane’s employer at Thornfield Hall, where she goes to work as a governess, fails in his initial attempt to marry her when the existence of his first wife, Bertha, locked up in the attic, is revealed. He gets Jane in the end, but only after being maimed and partially blinded in a fire set by Bertha, in which she perishes. It’s not exactly an eye for an eye, but it reflects the belief that actions have moral consequences.

“Wuthering Heights” abides by that convention. Heathcliff and Cathy both must suffer and die, lest readers make the mistake of believing it’s acceptable to profess undying love for your childhood companion while you’re seven months pregnant and married to another man (as Cathy does) or to try to kill your wife’s dog (as Heathcliff does), to name but two of their many offenses. The placid romance of Hareton and young Catherine leaves us, superficially, in a peaceful, even hopeful place.

But it is Heathcliff’s passionate declarations and shocking acts that stay in the mind and color our lasting impression of “Wuthering Heights” as strange and uncontainable. They will outlive the blood-red, entertaining raunch of Fennell’s movie, too, in spite of the recency bias that kicks in when we’re confronted with contemporary interpretations of classics. It’s humbling to admit that an isolated nineteenth-century Yorkshirewoman, of whom her sister wrote that “she had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived, than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates,” could possibly harbor thoughts as wild or knowing or kinky as we do now. But Brontë’s novel easily checks the first and third of those R-rated boxes. (As for the second, we can make our own assumptions.)

In Fennell’s previous film, “Saltburn,” she cemented her reputation as a provocateur with a sequence in which the main character strips down and humps his former friend’s grave. I see that scene and counter it with this one from Brontë: seventeen years after Cathy’s death, as her husband, Edgar, is being laid to rest beside her, Heathcliff persuades the sexton to open up Cathy’s grave, ascertains that she has not yet begun to decompose (“I saw her face again—it is hers yet . . . but he said it would change, if the air blew on it”), and then bribes the sexton to remove a side from each of their coffins once he is buried there, too, so that they can commingle for eternity. It’s a deliciously subversive image, and diabolically timeless. ♦